European Customers Rely on EMC to Transform Backup and Accelerate VMware Implementations

Legacy backup infrastructures are ill-suited to support the rapid adoption of virtualization. Implementing next-generation backup and recovery from EMC can eliminate bottlenecks and speed broader virtualized deployments.

The 3rd largest financial institution in Poland, Bank Zachodni, uses EMC backup and recovery solutions to protect both their physical and virtual infrastructures.

A large city in Finland, The City of Oulu, completely eliminated tape from its backup and recovery processes and reduced backup costs by 28%.

UK-based Derby College created a "hands off" backup environment in a backup redesign to support its virtualized environment.

Organizations can take specific steps related to backup and recovery to accelerate the virtualization of their physical servers. This is increasingly important as the percentage of applications deployed on virtual infrastructure advances beyond 50%.

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Customers of EMC® Corporation (NYSE: EMC) continue to see measurable and tangible benefits from EMC backup and recovery solutions. As customers architect backup infrastructures for their VMware environments, they often realize that legacy backup and recovery methods, including traditional backup software and tape, cannot offer the breadth of functionality that they need as they move from a physical to a virtual environment. The key to a successful and rapid transition to a redesigned backup infrastructure is choosing a solution that manages the existing environment while also aligning well to the needs of the emerging virtualized one. EMC can offer a broad portfolio of highly integrated next-generation backup products that satisfy the needs of customers, regardless of where they are in their virtualization process.

"Customers from across Europe are reporting tangible cost savings and operational improvements from EMC backup and recovery solutions. This release shows how EMC customers are transforming to next generation backup and are accelerating their virtualization initiatives. Virtualization is only part of the equation as there are also many physical assets to backup, including servers and desktops. Unlike competitive offerings, EMC provides our customers with backup and recovery solutions to meet the needs of their physical and their virtual environments."

The Flexibility to Address both Physical and Virtual

Bank Zachodni is Poland's third largest financial institution. One of the bank's key strategic IT initiatives is its journey to a cloud computing model. As a foundation for its move to the cloud, Bank Zachodni has mapped out its data protection strategy with a focus on fully automating its disaster recovery process and deploying modernized backup and recovery solutions that align to the needs of a virtualized environment. The bank chose EMC Avamar® deduplication software and systems and has realized distinct benefits for both its virtual and physical environments. This has had a direct impact on its transition to a cloud-based computing environment.

"In addition to drastically reduced backup windows due to Avamar's highly effective de-duplication, we find Avamar's simplicity and flexibility to be most impressive as a solution for the VMware platform. We have the flexibility to do both image and file level backups and we've found it to be equally cost effective for both our VMware and physical environments. In addition, a wide portfolio of plug-ins are available, which encompass a broad range of applications and operating system clients. Our Avamar implementation was simple and trouble-free, and now so are our backup and recoveries."

Complete Tape Elimination

The City of Oulu in Finland, population 141,671, had been backing up to tape. As they virtualized servers, their daily incremental backups began taking 12-14 hours and full backups were running through the entire weekend. It was fast becoming clear that, for their growing virtual environment, tape was no longer viable. To meet all their requirements, City of Oulu implemented a combination of EMC NetWorker® unified backup software, Avamar and Data Domain® dedpulication storage systems.

--Marko Niskala, Infrastructure Manager of City of Oulu

"With tape, we simply had no backup window left. With EMC, we've successfully solved our backup issues and reduced our data protection costs by 28% in the process. We are now 70% virtualized and have fast backups we can count on."

Eighty Percent Virtualized

UK-based Derby College, one of the largest further education colleges in the country, had tape-based backup processes that had become unmanageable and were inhibiting the completion of their server consolidation project. Tape backup and tape management were manually intensive and were consuming one full-time employee's efforts. Daily incremental backups were taking as long as 24 hours, and restores were taking as long as three days factoring in tape transportation services. Then Derby switched to EMC Avamar for backup of its now 80% virtualized environment. Today, the college performs full daily backups in only 3-4 hours and enjoys rapid restores and dramatically reduced management time.

--Ian McCormick, IT Infrastructure Manager for Derby College

"Backup at Derby College has gone from a full time job to essentially a no-time job. Our daily backup window time has been reduced by a factor of six, and time spent on managing our backups is negligible- basically more of a monitoring process. In addition, restores are simple- literally a few clicks and we're done. Avamar performs as promised, which is a testament to EMC. EMC has the expertise to make sure products like Avamar work well with VMware, and there's a significant level of comfort for us in that."

As each of these customer experiences demonstrates, there is a clear correlation between an organization's ability to transform backup infrastructure and processes and its ability to realize aggressive goals for server virtualization. In 2010, customers saw an important tipping point for virtualization when the percentage of applications deployed on virtual infrastructure surpassed the percentage of applications deployed on physical infrastructure. This race to realize the benefits of virtualization puts significant pressure on aging, tape-based infrastructures that were never intended to support virtual workloads. The organizations that are able to successfully deploy backup and recovery solutions that reduce or eliminate the use of tape, that adapt to both physical and virtual infrastructures and that deliver the operational and financial efficiencies required in modern IT shops are the ones that put themselves in the position to realize the highest yields from their server virtualization initiatives.

About EMC

EMC Corporation is a global leader in enabling businesses and service providers to transform their operations and deliver IT as a service. Fundamental to this transformation is cloud computing. Through innovative products and services, EMC accelerates the journey to cloud computing, helping IT departments to store, manage, protect and analyze their most valuable asset — information — in a more agile, trusted and cost-efficient way. Additional information about EMC can be found at www.EMC.com.

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This release contains "forward-looking statements" as defined under the Federal Securities Laws. Actual results could differ materially from those projected in the forward-looking statements as a result of certain risk factors, including but not limited to: (i) adverse changes in general economic or market conditions; (ii) delays or reductions in information technology spending; (iii) our ability to protect our proprietary technology; (iv) risks associated with managing the growth of our business, including risks associated with acquisitions and investments and the challenges and costs of integration, restructuring and achieving anticipated synergies; (v) fluctuations in VMware, Inc.'s operating results and risks associated with trading of VMware stock; (vi) competitive factors, including but not limited to pricing pressures and new product introductions; (vii) the relative and varying rates of product price and component cost declines and the volume and mixture of product and services revenues; (viii) component and product quality and availability; (ix) the transition to new products, the uncertainty of customer acceptance of new product offerings and rapid technological and market change; (x) insufficient, excess or obsolete inventory; (xi) war or acts of terrorism; (xii) the ability to attract and retain highly qualified employees; (xiii) fluctuating currency exchange rates; and (xiv) other one-time events and other important factors disclosed previously and from time to time in EMC's filings with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission. EMC disclaims any obligation to update any such forward-looking statements after the date of this release.